The 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics open on Friday and technology will be front and center, the many tech giants have released their quarterly earnings from the holidays, and the next update to Firefox puts a big emphasis on privacy.

The 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic is the most technology heavy Olympic games yet. Intel is producing what it calls the ‘largest virtual reality’ event ever with its official broadcast partners by pledging more than 50 hours of live VR programming for events like downhill skiing, figure skating, and hockey. Plus, Olympic official timekeeper Omega is debuting new tech to enhance viewers understanding with update stats, and various Olympic teams will be debuting technology infused equipment and techniques. For more, be sure to listen to our Tech in Sports podcast that you can find anywhere you are listening to Hashtag Trending.

The end of last week saw the many tech giants reveal their most recent quarterly earnings reports that covered the holiday season. Highlights include Apple reporting positive iPhone X sales despite reports that the company cut its production in half. Amazon reported a net income of nearly 2 billion dollars for the quarter, with CEO Jeff Bezos touting the success of Prime membership, Alexa devices, and its cloud services business, Amazon Web Services. Lastly, the cloud trend continued, with Microsoft reporting that its Azure cloud business grew 98 per cent last quarter.

And then some news from Reddit – Mozilla’s next update to its Firefox browser, dubbed Firefox 59, continues to build on already impressive renewed Firefox with a big focus on privacy. The new update will reduce how much information websites pass onwards about visitors when Firefox users are using its private browsing mode. By removing path information from referrer values sent to third parties from a website, Firefox 59 prevents any additional data leaking out to other sites.

That’s what’s trending today. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is brought to you by SAS, the world leader in advanced analytics and the Official Analytics Partner of the Canadian Olympic Team.